Project Gutenberg: Pros and Cons

For this entry, I thought it would be helpful to get more into detail on my absolute favorite eBook download site for finding vintage novels. I have very good reasons for liking it so much, and I hope they will also resonate with you, but before I begin, I'd like to elaborate more on what Project Gutenberg is, its history, and what its purpose and function is in the online book ecosystem.

What is Project Gutenberg?

Project Gutenberg is a website offering 50,000 free eBooks for downloading onto any device you choose. The books are no longer copyright protected, so you can also share them with friends or use them for any other purpose you have in mind. This includes a lot of pre-1923 vintage novels, (although, for the most part, they do tend to avoid anything published after that date, since there are some gray areas in those books as far as copyright law is concerned.)

Founder Michael S. Hart started Gutenberg on December 1, 1971, as an effort to digitize some of the most widely consulted books and make them easily available to whoever needed to use them. His first document was the Declaration of Independence, and since then he has curated and digitized a massive number of eBooks. Even after his passing in 2011, Project Gutenberg is still continuing his legacy by churning out numerous free eBooks every day.

As for what its purpose is, I can't even begin to tell you how many different people for how many different walks of life need it and depend on it. From the casual reader, to the seasoned publisher, to the graduate student, to the historical author, the uses for Gutenberg as a source of information or reading pleasure are always appreciated. Its function as a repository of information that one can access anytime, anywhere, for absolutely no charge, is, to my mind, equal to Wikipedia.

And now for the pros and cons.

In this section I will name a few things that are great about Project Gutenberg, and I'll follow that up with things that might need some improvement if more people are going to enjoy it. These lists reflect my personal observations and experiences, and are only my opinion.

Pros:

• There's absolutely no charge for any of the eBooks offered on the website. Yes, you heard me right! There is none. They are all free for the taking. (They do ask for donations, though, so please spread some love.)
• They are painstakingly proofread by a team of volunteers. This is a God-send. Whenever you look at any other website that offers free eBooks in this category, you'll often find that proofreading is deprioritized in favor of image scans of the physical pages themselves. This isn't bad, but it does limit how you can read their books, since you can only look at the static page images. Gutenberg, on the other hand, offers digital text that they extract from the books and then, with the help of their volunteers, (and were talking thousands of them,) polish thoroughly. This text reads exceedingly well, and can be viewed on a plethora of different devices, depending on which file format you download. (But they do offer all the popular formats, including kindle and ePub.)
• They are also very well formatted. These guys actually take the time to look at the original book and emulate the formatting as they see it. Quotes, captions, graphics, tables, drop-caps, etc. are placed and sized in a very attractive way that accurately reflects the experience you would have if you were to read the original edition yourself. (There are limitations on that in some cases, but they really do try, and they are sincere about it. You can just tell.)
• The books are logically organized. You can browse their catalog by author, title, or language; or you can look at their various categories, (which they also call "bookshelves.") This is helpful if you want to find novels, but you would have to poke and prod some because they don't have a section for novels, the closest thing being their "fiction bookshelf." (Nonetheless, that could be an excellent place to start.)

Cons:

• It would be nice if they also offered print editions. This might not work for them logistically, but I can definitely see print books being a sort of fundraising tactic, where they get print versions of their books made on demand, and they would charge a fair price for them, the profits going directly toward funding their efforts. So, essentially, it would be kind of like a donation with an added incentive. Also, I'm sure it wouldn't be at all difficult for them to persuade potential buyers, considering all the junk reprints that are already being made. (Please see one of my previous entries, "Steer clear of archival reprints!" for more on this issue.)
• Their website could use a revamp. I read a blog entry once recently that commented that the Gutenberg website looked "depressing." While I wouldn't go that far, (as I have seen much more dismal-looking sites out there,) I do think that a more lively look would do them some good. (And in light of all these fancy-looking "responsive HTML" websites that are popping up right and left, I think that would give them a serious leg up.) I also think that a slightly more efficient browsing and search interface would allow people to find exactly what they want in much less time. As I mentioned, their browsing and search functionality is pretty good, but there is still some room for improvement.
• Sometimes you can still run into formatting errors. To my recollection, I've only ever had one bad experience with Gutenberg, and that was on an old magazine that they had recently made available. I downloaded the ePub version on my Smartphone, and one of the block quotes in the book stretched past the edge of the screen, and I couldn't scroll to see the rest of it. Also, it isn't terribly uncommon for some books to not show all the italics, bolds, an diacritical marks that there should be. Occasionally you might run into some problems like that, but I would imagine that if you contacted them with any issues you find, (including spelling and grammatical errors, which also present themselves from time to time,) you would probably get through. With the exception of the block quote I just mentioned, these problems are not major interferences on your enjoyment of their books, (and lately they have gotten quite a bit better in this area.)

And that's it for my glowing review of Project Gutenberg. Please check them out it you haven't done so already. In the meantime, I've got a dinner to cook. (Yummm...)

"Roast Beef, Medium," by Edna Ferber (1911-1913)

"Roast Beef, Medium is not only a food. It is a philosophy..."

So begins one of the earliest and (unjustly) least known of the works of Edna Ferber. This is a book about a confident, poised saleswoman at the turn of the century--a time when sales was strictly "men's work." But that doesn't matter to Emma McChesney, because she knows what she's selling, she knows how to sell it, and she makes all her (chiefly male) competitors tremble in their macho-looking, tough leather boots!

Although this is not really a novel, it does read like one, (which is why many recent reviewers mistook it as such.) It was actually a series of short stories that were serialized in The American Magazine between 1911 and 1913, (when it finally appeared in book form. Yaaayyyy!!) Edna Ferber was only in her mid twenties when these stories came out, but they were already inviting her comparison to the newly-deceased O. Henry, (who died a tragic, lonely death at his apartment in 1910.) Although Edna Ferber had written short stories, as well as one novel, ("Dawn O'Hara, or The Girl Who Laughed," 1911,) it was the Emma McChesney stories that put her on the map for good and all. When you read them, it's easy to see how they could have that kind of effect. Her massive fan-base even included the one and only Theodore Roosevelt, (although he was not satisfied with the way the stories ended.)

The inspiration for Emma McChesney came from Ferber's mother, Julia, (who was so flattered that she often jokingly referred to herself as Julia McFerber.) Julia Ferber was an equally confident and head-strong woman, facing the same kinds of adversity that McChesney faces, and triumphing in the same way, which Edna Ferber found to be a big source of comfort and inspiration during a somewhat difficult youth.

I never like to give a lot away, but I still can't resist sharing at least a couple of the highlights of this book as I saw them.

• At the beginning, Emma McChesney starts getting friendly with a young man she meets in a restaurant, but when this young man (who is married) tries to kiss her, she spends the rest of the story reminding him of his duties as a married man. He is stunned at the reproach, and is sheepishly apologetic, but McChesney is so offended that she does not accept his apology. I know the way I worded it sounds mundane, but this is a laugh-out-loud part of the book. Always leave it to the sharp-tongued Emma McChesney to come up with lines like, "I don't mind telling you that I've got neuralgia from sitting in that park with my feet in the damp grass. I can feel it in my back teeth, and by eleven o'clock it will be camping over my left eye, with its little brothers doing a war dance up the side of my face," and "I've talked until I'm so low on words that I'll probably have to sell featherlooms in sign language to-morrow."
•  Jock, Emma McChesney's son, tricks her arch-nemesis, Ed Meyers of the Strauss Sans-Silk Skirt Co., into letting his mother make a sale before he even has the chance to. (And "stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and dropped his hat" in the process.) The illustration of this scene, (drawn by James Montgomery Flagg, of Uncle Sam "I Want You" poster fame,) is alone worthwhile, not to mention how Ed verbally reacts to this unexpected assault.

A big reason why this book is so often mistaken for a novel is that the end of the book is climactic in a way that you wouldn't expect from a disjointed set of stories. If you want an easy novel to start off with, this would not be a bad choice, since it only has ten chapters, (err... stories,) and they are pretty easy to read, even though they are a tad long. That, and also, the language is distinctly different from most books that were written at that time. Most of them sounded very formal and stiff, whereas the loose, relaxed vibe of this book is suggestive of an Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant flick.

And now it's time for dinner. (No roast beef, medium for me, but I consider that a good thing. ;) )

Steer clear of archival reprints!

For this blog entry, I'm going to explain why you should stay completely away from archival reprints of vintage novels.

But first, what is an archival reprint??

Simply put, an archival reprint is a reprint edition of any vintage book, (and by vintage, I'm referring to anything fifty years old or older,) that treats the book as an historic relic to be preserved for future generations. The idea itself is not bad, but the way they do it is flawed on many levels.

I'll take a few moments, before I go too far into this, to name some examples of companies that do the kind of thing I'm talking about here.

• Kessinger Publishing
• BiblioBazaar
• Nabu Press
• Forgotten Books
• Literary Licensing, LLC

I'll elaborate more on my own experience with these publishers, but first I'd like to share another blog entry by somebody who had a similar experience with a book from Kessinger. As you can see from his screenshots, there has been absolutely no effort at all from the publishers in ensuring that the book looks even halfway decent.

In the first screenshot, you can see a library marking that says "Stanford University Library," which can often be spotted in these reprints, and it is also very common to see the library's checkout card in the front of the book. (Obviously, one can surmise that these books are borrowed from libraries for this purpose.) In the second, one page is darker than the other. (Seriously, WTH?)

And why do they do it?

This can best be summed up in an Amazon product description for a Nabu Press reprint:

"This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book."

And that's their excuse?? Oh, never mind that you can't even read the darn things, just as long as they have "elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed books worldwide." (To say nothing of the fact that some of the flaws are "introduced by the scanning process." That just gives them away as careless and without class!) As Puck so famously put it, "what fools these mortals be!"

Now, for the icing on the cake... my experience!

And this is the moment you've all been waiting for. What was my experience, and why do I have such strong feelings about this.

I bought three Nabu Press books around Christmas of 2012, and they were basically readable, but I was absolutely floored by so much of what I saw in these books. A few of the scanned pages had big chunks ripped out of the corners, (which ended up in the reproduction;) the text on some pages was all warped so it looked like it was yanked out of the scanner before it finished scanning, (which it probably was;) the images were so blurry that I sometimes couldn't make them out; the images were sometimes reproduced as binary black and white images, (i.e. no gray areas,) and since these images were originally halftones, you can probably imagine how that must have looked. I didn't raise the issue at the time because I knew what to expect, and I wanted the books for another purpose besides my own enjoyment, but now it has me perturbed.

In October of 2014, I ordered a BiblioBazaar reprint copy of "The Ne'er-Do-Well" by Rex Beach, and, when it was delivered, I was very disappointed to see that the book was around a foot high and nine or ten inches wide. That's way too huge and bulky to curl up and relax with. I didn't even look at the inside of it before I put it in an estate sale. I just didn't think that wrestling with half a ton of book was exactly what I had in mind when I bought this. (Yup. Size does matter, Folks!)

And, just within the last month or so, I bought a Forgotten Books reprint of "In the Fog," by Richard Harding Davis. (Excellent book, by the way. Check out my reviews for it. They are the previous entries.) Knowing what happened with my BiblioBazaar debacle, I checked Amazon's height and width stats, and was pleased to find that it was a 6X9. That's a pretty comfortable size for a novel. I had visited the publisher's website, and it seemed like they were more or less with the program, (although I wasn't too thrilled that they didn't bother to include links to where they were selling their print versions.)

I was excited when I received it, and I took a look inside. I wasn't even halfway through my scrutiny of the book's quality when I found a page missing. Disappointed and furious, I sent it straight back for a full refund.

But how do you get a good reprint?

Always examine the book itself. The sales page on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, (or wherever you go to buy your books,) should give you a pretty good idea what you're getting into. If the description summarizes the book individually rather than going into that "This is a reproduction of a pre-1923 title..." tirade, that's a pretty safe bet that it should be good--but it doesn't end there. The cover should be fairly well designed, (after all, the cover is the most important selling point of any book, and a quick look at the "bad" reprint editions I'm referring to here will reveal that a good cover seems to be next to the bottom of their priority list;) and also, the publisher should have a website that elaborates more on what they're about. If it just looks like a poorly organized catalog with no logical arrangement, then they're probably not worth your time, but if they make it clear to you what they're trying to do and how they are going about doing it, and there's an integrity to their business model as they explain it, that should make it fair game.

If there aren't any quality reprints available for the title you're looking for, you can always search for it on worldcat.org, and you'll find many libraries that hold the original editions. (eBay usually also has them, if you'd rather buy, but that can sometimes be expensive.) And if nothing else, you can always read the eBook. That's what I did with "In the Fog," (but only because my house isn't very well-lit. ;) )

Thanks very much for reading this, (even if I might have sounded a bit whiny in some odd places,) and I hope this has been helpful. Remember this, though: books are our best friends, so please buy them from people who treat them as such.

"In the Fog," by Richard Harding Davis (1901), Part 2

I am positively thrilled to report that "In the Fog" was every bit as good as I anticipated it, and while I won't give away the ending, I will say that it was one of those unexpected "O. Henry" moments that, for the life of me, I couldn't see coming.

You should definitely check this one out if you like good murder mysteries. I'm going to share some links to the best copies of this book I could find. This book is not in print, however, there are some archival reprints that you can buy on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. But please, stay away from them!!! (I'll explain why in my next blog entry very soon.) Below are some electronic editions that I personally recommend.

• Archive.org - This copy has been scanned and uploaded directly, and therefore, you will notice that the pages look exactly as they would if you had a physical copy of the book. This could work very well on a device such as an iPad or any other tablet. (The computer also displays these files pretty well.) However, don't try this on a smartphone or an iPod touch. These screens are very small and the pages will be shrunk to where you can't read them. They do offer plain text, and while that form can be adjusted to read better, I do not recommend it. The text is poorly reproduced and it's chock-full of grammatical errors and misspellings galore.
• Project Gutenberg - This is an excellent way to read this book, as the text has been copied from the physical and proofread so that it matches. Because this is digital text instead of a fixed page-scan, you can adjust the size on your device so that it's big enough to read. (If you're looking at the HTML, that might be hard to do, so if you have a tablet or smartphone, you should download the ePub file that they offer, and then you should be able to change things around so you can read it better.)
• Google Books - This is the same as the Archive.org version I just wrote about. For smartphone users, you have the option to download an ePub version. I had a brief look at it just now, and it seems fine, but it does have some flaws. You're probably better off reading the Project Gutenberg version if that bothers you.
• Amazon Kindle - This is the edition that I read, and it was perfect! (And I got it at the best price, too - FREE.) There were a couple of typos, but nothing major. The only thing I took any issue with was the fact that the text is interrupted periodically by captions for illustrations that were in the original edition, but for some reason are absent from this one. It's a tolerable annoyance when you consider what a treat this book is.
• LibriVox - While this isn't quite the same thing as the above, I thought I'd also include this audio edition for those of you who would rather listen to your books than read them. For what it's worth, these audio books are pretty good, even if, half the time, the volunteers who read them sound like mind-controlled robots. These are great for listening to on your smartphone when on a morning jog, or on your car stereo during a road trip. (I just had a brief listen to this version, and its reader, Bob Gonzales, does a good upper-class British accent. Just sayin'...) Also, I have noticed that these recordings often end up on YouTube, and that is also true of this one. Just do a search for it if that's how you want to listen, but I personally find that YouTube isn't really the best place to listen to audiobooks.

And if you do best with print editions, there are libraries that have their own copies. For a comprehensive list of the libraries that carry this title, click here.

And that's it for our first review. I will be posting more reviews and other miscellaneous articles relating to vintage novels very soon.

Until then, au revoir...

"In the Fog," by Richard Harding Davis (1901)

Although I am not finished with this book yet, and I don't know how it'll end, I figured an early review would be in order. (That and the fact that it's by one of my all-time favorite authors. :) )

But first, I'd like to give a little background on the brains behind this book. Richard Harding Davis was born in 1864 to literary parents. His mother, Rebecca Harding Davis, was a successful novelist, and wrote "Life in the Iron Mills," (1861). His father, Lemuel Clarke Davis (1835-1904), a bored lawyer turned journalist, also wrote a novel, ("A Stranded Ship: a Story of Sea and Shore," 1869), although journalism was his forte.

He was always regarded by those who knew him as a big ham or showoff, and although he made a lot of enemies in college and high school, it would later pay off, as he not only became the model for popular American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Man," but his clean-shaven appearance also had such a massive influence on American fashion that it was a catalyst for the eventual decline of the handlebar mustache. After dropping out of college and being fired from his first journalism job, he wrote "Soldiers of Fortune," which was an overnight success, and earned him a long and exciting writing career, although he continued journalism with much success. As a journalist, he also had an impressive track-record, as he reported on such momentous events as the Johnstown flood and the execution of William Kemmler, (the first criminal to be executed by means of the electric chair.)

His life was an extremely active one, as he traveled extensively to many exotic places, and he even bravely reported in militarized areas that were often too dangerous to venture in. (In fact, when he reported the shelling of Matanzas, Cuba, from a United States Navy vessel during the Spanish-American War, his headline-making report resulted in the U. S. Navy prohibiting reporters from boarding it's ships for the rest of the war. Was this for their safety? I hope so...) However, his devil-may-care attitude towards reporting on location during a war was an asset, because it led him to gain a more accurate perspective on all the wars he documented. These included the Second Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. Possibly because he couldn't or wouldn't take it easy for a while, he died very young, (a week before his fifty-second birthday in 1916,) but, as the surrounding circumstances suggest, (at least to me,) it could also have been because he was preoccupied with the very real possibility that the United States would enter World War I, (a possibility which was realized in 1917,) and that we as yet were not prepared for our involvement. (He was on the phone dictating letters about preparedness when he died of a heart attack.)

As a fiction writer, he was somewhat versatile, but he usually leaned towards either high society settings, or political settings. So this novel, a murder mystery, is somewhat outside his usual subject matter, although it has an abundance of high society, political, military, and even jungle expedition related themes running throughout. It is, in spite of the fact that he included plenty of familiar subject matter, his only murder mystery. Why this is, I can't say, because, in reading it, I find it to be just as masterful as anything else to come from his pen. His use of plot is extremely effective, as he can keep you riveted from the first page to the last seemingly without effort, and this book is no exception. (Did he consider mysteries to be a weakness of his? Was he just not interested?)

Anyway, I am giving you a brief synopsis of what I read so far, but please be advised that it's very detailed and it might give too much away. (But if it makes you feel any better, I cannot and will not tell you how any of the reviewed books end. I'm not that much of a killjoy. ;) )

---

The book opens in an extremely fashionable and exclusive club in London, where a group of men are quietly gossiping about a parliament member who is sitting next to the fire reading a book. This man, called Sir Andrew, is getting ready to pass the Navy Increase Bill, which is very unpopular among those gossiping. (I chuckled inwardly when "the gentleman with the black pearl," as he is referred to, says "Now, had I the spirit of our ancestors, I would bring chloroform from the nearest chemist's and drug him in that chair. I would tumble his unconscious form into a hansom cab, and hold him prisoner until daylight. If I did, I would save the British taxpayer the cost of five more battleships, many millions of pounds.") One of them hatches a very clever plan to keep him from attending parliament that night by telling him a story about a murder he (supposedly) witnessed the previous night. (As they all know, "Shilling-Shockers" and any story involving murder and intrigue, are his biggest weakness, so they believe that they can use that to their advantage.) After they coax the reluctant Sir Andrew to stay with them for a few moments, ("You cannot leave us now," [the gentleman with the pearl] exclaimed. "Mr. Sears is just about to tell us of this remarkable crime.") Lieutenant Ripley Sears, (also known as "the American,") begins the story by telling about how, as he is stumbling through a dense London fog, (hence, the title,) he essentially breaks and enters into a private residence, (and I find it suspiciously bizarre how nonchalant the Russian servant is about this,) where he finds two dead bodies with tiny, immaculate knife wounds in each of their chests. After making a somewhat hurried attempt at finding out who the killer is, he thinks he knows the answer. But two other club members offer their versions of the story, (one of which involves an attempted robbery that occurred a while prior, and seems unrelated to the plot--a fact that earns its human source a good telling-off from the other club members.) The third adamantly exonerates the assumed suspect by revealing some conclusive details about the crime. This contribution to the narrative is ostensibly supposed to be what ends it all, although, even having read 88% of the book, I still can't see how. (There are so many plot twists in this book, it's almost ridiculous.)

I will finish reading this book soon, and will update you further, but I still believe that to truly appreciate this book, you have to read it yourself.